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Author: Albert Jack
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141903473
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
'Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. Was Sir Winston Churchill really a Druid? Did Charlie Chaplin lose a lookalike competition? Did The Who's drummer Keith Moon drive his Rolls Royce into a swimming pool? The man with the answers is Albert Jack...' - Daily Express From Walt Disney's frozen head to the kidnap of JFK's brain, Albert Jack gathers together all the strangest, sickest, funniest and most unforgettable urban legends and recounts them with his usual deadpan humour. But this is more than just a collection of urban legends, it is also a detective story. Exploring the real events behind conspiracy theories, the exaggerations of history and the assumptions of old wives’ tales, Albert Jack shows us that the truth can definitely be stranger than fiction...
Author: Albert Jack
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141903473
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Get Book Here
Book Description
'Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. Was Sir Winston Churchill really a Druid? Did Charlie Chaplin lose a lookalike competition? Did The Who's drummer Keith Moon drive his Rolls Royce into a swimming pool? The man with the answers is Albert Jack...' - Daily Express From Walt Disney's frozen head to the kidnap of JFK's brain, Albert Jack gathers together all the strangest, sickest, funniest and most unforgettable urban legends and recounts them with his usual deadpan humour. But this is more than just a collection of urban legends, it is also a detective story. Exploring the real events behind conspiracy theories, the exaggerations of history and the assumptions of old wives’ tales, Albert Jack shows us that the truth can definitely be stranger than fiction...
Author: Albert Jack
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101619341
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 163
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Book Description
Have you heard the one about… • Walt Disney’s frozen body? • Coca-Cola owning Santa Claus? • Alligators living in New York City sewers? We all love a good story. But where do the urban legends, conspiracy theories, and old wives’ tales we hear every day really originate? Albert Jack explores the best, strangest, and funniest of the tales so many of us take as gospel, and uncovers some eye-popping true stories that are even more far-fetched than their mythical counterparts. From Robin Hood to JFK’s brain, from hamsters under carpets to mysterious travelers, you’ll never be short of a scary or bizarre anecdote again.
Author: Albert Jack
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101187530
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
The fun and fascinating follow-up to the international bestseller Red Herrings and White Elephants Why do people put their "skeletons in a closet," "have a hunch," "get the cold shoulder," "get dressed up to the nines," or "call a spade a spade?" These phrases are used every day, yet most people have little or no idea where most of them come from. In Black Sheep and Lame Ducks, Albert Jack takes readers on a journey through the curious- and often bizarre-origins of hundreds of their favorite idioms and expressions. For example, "wearing your heart on your sleeve" comes from the Middle Ages, when a lady would "give her heart" in the form of a handkerchief pinned to the sleeve of a knight who was about to go into battle. And calling someone the "black sheep in the family" refers to a thousands- year-old belief that a black lamb in a flock was unpopular because its fleece was undyeable and therefore less valuable. With Black Sheep and Lame Ducks, any language-lover can feel like a "Smart Aleck"-and also know exactly who that was.
Author: Albert Jack
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101551143
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
Did you know... the term "hot dog" is believed to have been coined during a baseball game between the Yankees and the Giants in 1901? calzones get their name from their less-than-glamorous looks: calzone means "trouser leg" or "drooping sack" in Italian? the word "salary" comes from Roman soldiers being paid their wages in salt? shrimp cocktail became popular in the 1920s as a safe way of "having a cocktail" during Prohibition? the Cobb salad was invented by Robert H. Cobb-founder of the Brown Derby restaurant chains-who threw the salad together for Sidney Grauman-owner of the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood-as a midnight snack based on ingredients in his refrigerator? In What Caesar Did For My Salad, historian Albert Jack offers a fascinating look at the unexpected stories, creators, and bizarre origins behind the world's most beloved dishes. Who was Margherita, for instance, and why was the world's most famous pizza named after her? Why do we call our favorite kinds of coffee espresso or cappuccino? Did medieval Turkish soldiers really invent the kebab by threading bits of meat on to their swords and balancing them on top of their campfires? What exactly does horseradish sauce have to do with our equine friends? From your morning eggs to America's favorite pies, fries, and martinis, you'll never look at your kitchen pantry or refrigerator in the same light again.
Author: Albert Jack
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446456099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
Did you know that an assassin is a hashish-eater and a yokel a country woodpecker? That Dr Mesmer mesmerised patients back to health or that Samuel Pepys enjoyed a good game of handicap? While we're at it, what have spondulics to do with spines or lawyers with avocados? In It's a Wonderful Word, bestselling author Albert Jack collects over 500 of the strangest, funniest-sounding and most delightful words in the English language, and traces them back to their often puzzling origins. While brushing up on your gibberish or gobbledygook, discover why bastards should resent travelling salesmen, why sheets should remain on tenterhooks and why you should never set down a tumbler before finishing your drink. From blotto to bamboozle and from claptrap to quango, Albert Jack's addictive anecdotes bring the world's most colourful language to life and are guaranteed to surprise and entertain.
Author: Albert Jack
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014192991X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
This is a book for everyone who has ever wondered why pubs should be called The Cross Keys, The Dew Drop Inn or The Hope and Anchor. You'll be glad to know that there are very good - strange and memorable - reasons behind them all. After much research about (and in) pubs, Albert Jack brings together the stories behind pub names to reveal how they offer fascinating and subversive insights on our history, customs, attitudes and jokes in just the same way that nursery rhymes do. The Royal Oak, for instance, commemorates the tree that hid Charles II from Cromwell's forces after his defeat at Worcester; The Bag of Nails is a corruption of the Bacchanals, the crazed followers of Bacchus, the god of wine and drunkenness; The Cat and the Fiddle a mangling of Catherine La Fidele and a guarded gesture of support for Henry VIII's first, Catholic, wife Catherine of Aragon; plus many, many more. Here too are even more facts about everything from ghosts to drinking songs to the rules of cribbage and shove hapenny, showing that, ultimately, the story of pub history is really the story of our own popular history
Author: Arthur James Wells
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bibliography, National
Languages : en
Pages : 1922
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Book Description
Author: Albert Jack
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141909307
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Mr Jack has been nimble and he’s been quick, searching through the history of nursery rhymes and he’s found out all kind of plum tales, just like little Jack Horner. He's unearthed the answers to some very curious questions... Who were Mary Quite Contrary and Georgie Porgie? How could Hey Diddle Diddle offer an essential astronomy lesson? And if Ring a Ring a Roses isn’t about catching the plague, then, what is it really about? The ingenious book delves into the hidden meanings of the nursery rhymes and songs we all know so well and discovers all kinds of strange tales ranging from Viking raids to firewalking and from political rebellion to slaves being smuggled to freedom. Children have always played at being grown up and all kinds of episodes in our history are still being re-enacted today in a series of dark games (Oranges and Lemons traces a condemned man’s journey across London to his execution, Goosie Gander is about dragging a hidden Catholic priest to prison) And there are many many more... Full of vivid illustrations and with each verse reproduced, here are a multitude of surprising stories you won’t be able to resist passing on to everyone you know. Your childhood songs and rhymes will never sound the same again.
Author: Albert Jack
Publisher: Metro Publishing
ISBN: 1782192743
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 119
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Book Description
Have you ever wondered what phrases such as 'square meal', 'load of old codswallop', 'egg on your face' or 'in the limelight' mean? Where do they come from? Have you ever taken a moment to wonder what we say actually means? The origins of hundreds of common phrases are explained in this irreverent journey through the most fascinating and richest regions of the English language. In a book that takes you all over the world, from nautical origins to food and drink terms, once you have learnt one phrase, you will be eager to learn them all! From the drop of a hat to the bitter end - you'll be surprised and intrigued and you'll never speak English in the same way again.
Author: Christopher Michael Langan
Publisher: Mega Foundation Press
ISBN: 0971916225
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 94
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Book Description
Paperback version of the 2002 paper published in the journal Progress in Information, Complexity, and Design (PCID). ABSTRACT Inasmuch as science is observational or perceptual in nature, the goal of providing a scientific model and mechanism for the evolution of complex systems ultimately requires a supporting theory of reality of which perception itself is the model (or theory-to-universe mapping). Where information is the abstract currency of perception, such a theory must incorporate the theory of information while extending the information concept to incorporate reflexive self-processing in order to achieve an intrinsic (self-contained) description of reality. This extension is associated with a limiting formulation of model theory identifying mental and physical reality, resulting in a reflexively self-generating, self-modeling theory of reality identical to its universe on the syntactic level. By the nature of its derivation, this theory, the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, can be regarded as a supertautological reality-theoretic extension of logic. Uniting the theory of reality with an advanced form of computational language theory, the CTMU describes reality as a Self Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL, a reflexive intrinsic language characterized not only by self-reference and recursive self-definition, but full self-configuration and self-execution (reflexive read-write functionality). SCSPL reality embodies a dual-aspect monism consisting of infocognition, self-transducing information residing in self-recognizing SCSPL elements called syntactic operators. The CTMU identifies itself with the structure of these operators and thus with the distributive syntax of its self-modeling SCSPL universe, including the reflexive grammar by which the universe refines itself from unbound telesis or UBT, a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint. Under the guidance of a limiting (intrinsic) form of anthropic principle called the Telic Principle, SCSPL evolves by telic recursion, jointly configuring syntax and state while maximizing a generalized self-selection parameter and adjusting on the fly to freely-changing internal conditions. SCSPL relates space, time and object by means of conspansive duality and conspansion, an SCSPL-grammatical process featuring an alternation between dual phases of existence associated with design and actualization and related to the familiar wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. By distributing the design phase of reality over the actualization phase, conspansive spacetime also provides a distributed mechanism for Intelligent Design, adjoining to the restrictive principle of natural selection a basic means of generating information and complexity. Addressing physical evolution on not only the biological but cosmic level, the CTMU addresses the most evident deficiencies and paradoxes associated with conventional discrete and continuum models of reality, including temporal directionality and accelerating cosmic expansion, while preserving virtually all of the major benefits of current scientific and mathematical paradigms.
